We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Fifteen posts into this series -- and I certainly hope that you have read all of them -- perhaps there are still a few of you out there who continue to believe that this whole global average surface temperature (GAST), "hottest year ever," "record warming" thing can't really be completely fraudulent...

Josh Barro is a recovering ex-Republican who is now a member of a niche political group: the non-crazy Democrats. He coined a cute phrase — “the hamburger problem” — to describe the relentless politicization of everything by progressives and Democrats. He writes, “Democrats’ problem isn’t that they’re on the wrong side of policy issues. It’s that they’re too ready to bother too many ordinary people about too many of their personal choices, all the way down to the hamburgers they eat.” He cites nonstop Democratic hectoring on, inter alia, the team name of the Washington Redskins, the way men sit on subway trains, and even some Americans’ choice not to abide by China’s one-child standard as the reasons why the party is today as electorally wobbly as Rocky Balboa in the 15th round. Yet the GOP’s success puzzles him still, because so many core Democratic cultural ideals (notably, gay marriage and marijuana decriminalization) poll more and more strongly.

...

When John Stuart Mill called the British conservatives “the stupidest party,” it stuck. Today the Democrats are the Annoying Party. The Left thinks Americans are picturing Mary Poppins when they talk about the nanny state; in truth, they’re thinking of Nurse Ratched. The prospect of a new set of nuisances being dreamed up and lashingly enforced by Hillary Clinton is what led voters to roll the dice with an Atlantic City grifter.

It would be far better to teach the vital lesson that good men, well-meaning men, brave men and women, can be dreadfully wrong by our current standards and understanding. Charlemagne’s world is not the post-modern European Union. Neither was that of Cortez and De Soto. We need to be studying these men and women in order to remember that they did great things in terrible ways, they did what we today consider heinous things in the name of what they believe to be a great good, that they were not perfect and neither are we. Napoleon was a great man. A great and terrible man, because the wars he unleashed on Europe and his exporting the ideas of the French Revolution led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, people left homeless, and sowed the seeds for troubles that were and are still bearing fruit. So do we erase Napoleon from European history? Or do we learn from all his complexity?

The city is severely damaged, with neighborhoods reduced to rubble. Its people have endured sustained terror.

Blame ISIS for the terror and ruin. ISIS commanders relied on beheadings and torture to control the population. They obliterated numerous shrines and historic sites in the region, with the biblical city of Nimrud a special target. Why? Erasing history ISIS leaders deemed "un-Islamic" was a key political policy.

While the authors heart may have been in the right place, the basic premise of this article is founded on some perverse assertions and assumptions.

Factor in the lack of real work found in:
-- all unemployment (U3/U6),
-- an ever decreasing workforce participation rate,
-- government make work/no show bureaucratic jobs,
-- make work (lower and higher) education sector jobs,
-- corporate patronage jobs (ICU2 Chelsea Clinton),
-- and so on...

...and additional (massive) stressors on the workforce are bound to induce some profound "dislocations", especially for many people with very narrow skill sets and an inherent inability to improvise, adapt, and overcome (except, of course, on Facebook, Snapchat, and Tumblr).

Does anyone really ever wonder why we have an opioid addiction epidemic?

There is an opioid epidemic because the have a mass of population that has been conditioned into helplessness by the government school system then dumped out on the street because the jobs they were conditioned for no longer are in any great quantity.

18 long years of servitude do not prepare students to be innovative, creative or think for themselves. It is worse today as there are more A students than students who got Cs because they were thinking for themselves.

"There is an opioid epidemic because" we have a massive welfare population with money and nothing productive to take up their time. If tomorrow welfare spending was slashed to zero 95% of drug pushers and smugglers would be out of business. Welfare is mostly spent on drugs, alcohol and cigarettes.

Also,educators seem to have discovered that parents rarely complain when Johnie and Susie get good grades. Accordingly, they have the self-esteem of a straight A student, but the abilities and drive of someone much less able.

And it continues right on through college.

More than half of Harvard's most recent graduates had an A- GPA or better
http://www.businessinsider.com/more-than-half-of-harvards-most-recent-graduates-had-an-a-gpa-or-better-2015-5

Contrarian: So 59 deg F was the "average global temperature" for the 30-year period 1950-1980.

The 59°F figure is only a broad estimate. Climate scientists use temperature anomalies, not absolute temperature, to reach their conclusions concerning a warming world.

Temperature stations are not uniformly distributed across the globe, and in geologically complex environments it is not possible to capture the absolute temperature even of a small region. On the other hand, if temperature stations in thousands of locations around the world are showing a statistically significant increase in temperature, a temperature anomaly, then we can surmise that global temperatures are increasing (absent some biasing factor).

QUOTE:

Contrarian: Since NOAA and NASA will not provide a remotely satisfactory explanation of what they are doing with the adjustments

Most research studies include how adjustments are made in the Methods section, and there are even entire studies on adjustments. Furthermore, independent statistical studies of raw temperature measurements have upheld the overall findings concerning a warming world.

The main source for the CO2 "data" showing increases in CO2 emissions causing "global warming" comes from a NOAA/NASA observation station on the slopes of Mauna Loa on the Island of Hawaii. All of the air on the "Big Island" is often severely contaminated by "vog," or volcanic smog, caused by an eruption a Kilauea crater which has been going on continuously since the 1980s, which is coincidentally when this whole theory of "global warming" through increased CO2 started. Needless to say, this one volcano cranks out more air pollution every day than most spots in the world.

The vog pollution is so bad that it not only affects the Island of Hawaii but when the winds are still, spreads hundreds of miles to the other islands. I can show you pictures of Honolulu where the vog is so bad it looks worse than L.A. on a bad day. Hawaii has the nation's worst incidence of asthma, largely caused by the exposure of people to vog, and on a bad vog day you can see people hacking all over. For me, first my eyes begin to water, and then the cough starts.

This is what they use to measure CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Needless to say, all of this data is contaminated and must be "adjusted" to get what the "scientists" are telling us is the correct information. When your data is corrupted to start with, you are simply making assumptions as to what you think the amount of contamination is, and you can play with the data any way you want.

We here in Hawaii have known this for many years, but hey, we just laugh about people on the Mainland thinking they are all going to die because of our air quality here.

Jim: The main source for the CO2 "data" showing increases in CO2 emissions causing "global warming" comes from a NOAA/NASA observation station on the slopes of Mauna Loa on the Island of Hawaii.

Atmospheric CO2 is measured at thousands of ground stations around the world, and they show that CO2 is a well-mixed gas, and that the levels are rising. CO2 is also measured by satellite, Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, and by ASCENDS CarbonHawk Experiment Simulator which measures CO2 by passing a laser through the atmosphere. You can even measure it yourself, which can be done chemically or with IR detectors.

The science of measuring average temperature is inexact only when the data are relevant to showing that temperature have not changed markedly in recent decades. They become precise and persuasive--even incontrovertible--when they are relevant to showing that the earth is warming. The facility with which one slips from one argument to the other is the mark of a committed climate alarmist.

Senior Democrats plus the donor class think that they can make Kamala Harris into the next Obama - like him she is mixed-race, attractive, and from a solidly blue state. These puff piece articles are just the beginning.

Unlike Obama, however, Kamala Harris has a lot of baggage (like getting her first professional breaks by being Willie Brown's mistress while he was Speaker of the California Assembly). To put it mildly, that's not a good look.

Can't erase all the news articles from the 1990s. People are going to find it.

None of that will make any difference. After all, Obama hobnobbed with a domestic terrorist, had a shady land deal with a shady guy, and attended a church run by an anti-American pastor and none of that hurt him.

ISIS lost Mosul but the shocking news is they weren’t the only perpetrators of crimes against civilians. Members of the U.S.-led coalition working to fight ISIS would launch airstrikes on ISIS-controlled areas of Mosul that were full of noncombatants, thanks to ISIS’s campaign to displace people from their villages.

According to the latest report ISIS fighters Aren’t The Only Ones Who Brutalized Mosul’s Civilians.

You can find the link right after my name. As I tried to post it here but it's not showing. Don't know the reason is.

USA Today: People Might Be Upset By Lack Of Women, Black People In ‘Dunkirk

In fact, African troops in the French Army provided crucial cover for the British evacuation. There were also several companies of Indian troops in the British army who deported themselves especially well.

As best I can tell none of the reviewers complaining about the absence of minorities in 'Dunkirk' has raised your historical observation that there were non-white troops from the British and French colonies in action. I'm also quite willing to bet that if those units were depicted with historical accuracy there would have been complaints about the glorification of colonization or allusions to slavery.

What gets me about the ex-Republican...he is relying on polling that I find suspect. Polling last year was so incredibly wrong. I just don't believe polling numbers about Democrat-pushed social policies. Sorry, I just don't.

Plus, the topic of 'gay marriage.' There was nothing stopping anyone from 'marrying' as a gay couple. The only thing they wanted was acknowledgment from the state.

Guess what? I would've STILL gotten married to my husband despite how the state would've treated our relationship. Because marriage is not about the state telling me: yep, you are officially now a married couple. No, it is about my religion and how I view marriage.

I do not remember anyone telling gay people 'you cannot get married.' The only thing that was being said was, 'the state does not acknowledge marriages between two people of the same sex, because that is not marriage.'

I wonder how happy all of these gay couples are now? They only will end up with a higher financial impact because they are married. Combined income as married people means higher tax brackets and more tax paid. If you apply for that financial aid for your kid, the FAFSA is not so kind to you anymore and your kid will have to cough up more of his own money to attend. Etc.

Anyway, I'm not buying the idea that leftist social ideas are growing in popularity. It's fake news.

Polling by professional pollers "could' be right or could be wrong. The two biggest problems for anyone today trying to take a poll of American opinions today are that few of us have home phones so any poll will exclude a lot of people for this reason AND that many people choose not to participate. When I had a home phone I would typically hang up on a poll taker or if I felt like it I would lie to them. This is the problem with honest polls.

However I believe that most polls are intentionally dishonest where the questions are worded to obtain the desired responses AND the poll takers seek out the population that will respond as desired. This is intended to create polling data that will encourage others, mostly the low information voters, to vote a certain way.

Ask people they support letting "kids" stay on their parent's healthcare plan until 26 and you get a big yes. Ask them is they support letting "kids" stay on their parent's healthcare plan if it would cost the respondent $1200 per year, and it flips. The $1200 per year is what economist have found it costs each purchaser of healthcare regardless of age or whether they have kids.

The problem is the subsidies. If there were an 'option' to keep your child on your health insurance and by choosing that option you paid the cost that would be eminently fair and likely rarely chosen. Allow the insurance companies to create a menu of options for health care insurance and to charge accordingly and allow the citizens to chose what they want and pay for what they chose.

Individual state polling was less accurate, though. Analysis indicates that many undecideds in the battleground states only made their mind up the week before the election, and they trended towards Trump.

MissT: I would've STILL gotten married to my husband despite how the state would've treated our relationship. Because marriage is not about the state telling me: yep, you are officially now a married couple. No, it is about my religion and how I view marriage.

Let's guess that you still have a marriage license issued by the government.

MissT: I wonder how happy all of these gay couples are now?

Probably much like other married couples; great happiness followed by the realities of married life.

Sorry to be off-topic but it has come to my attention that the Senior Lifetime Pass from the National Park service shall increase from $10 to $80 (!) on August 28, 2017. You may find out more: https://www.nps.gov/planyourvisit/senior-pass-changes.htm

Actually this has been planned for years now. The various national parks have put off maintenance and improvements and various schemes have been proposed to find funding to take care of these problems including increased fees.

Some years back while visiting Yellowstone I discussed the sad state of the park with one of the rangers there and of course his view was lack of funding. This was right after the big fire at Yellowstone and I pointed out that a company in Wyoming had offered to harvest some of those fire killed trees and pay the park a million bucks for them. The park opted to let them rot standing up where they then would become a hazard for decades. I guess the idea of a million bucks just didn't appeal to them.

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